Barack Obama hasn’t talked much about tax policy since his run-in with Joe the Plumber, but one of his biggest challenges will be fixing a system where the tax burden is increasingly skewed toward the little guy:

Barack Obama, it’s fair to say, has a lot on his plate right now: Halt the economic freefall, reform health insurance, extricate our troops from Iraq, stop SUV drivers from turning the Earth into a hellish postapocalyptic wasteland. Then there’s one of our country’s biggest, if less mentioned, messes: tax policy.

In recent decades, it seems, no matter how much money we as a nation produce, it all ends up in the pockets of about twelve people. Since the mid-’80s, the average income of the bottom nine-tenths of Americans has gone up about 6 percent; for the rich, it’s nearly doubled… [read more]